Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has hit out at the possibility of former U.S. President Donald Trump being detained as a political move to prevent him from contesting the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
There is speculation the former Republican president is to be arrested this week following a probe into alleged hush money payments made during the 2016 presidential campaign, and Trump himself announced over the weekend that he expects to be indicted.
“Leading Republican candidate and former President of the United States of America will be arrested on Tuesday of next week. Protest, take our nation back!” Trump recently wrote on his social media site, Truth Social, as he urged his supporters to protest against the “corrupt and highly political Manhattan district attorney’s office.”
López Obrador, often described as a left-wing populist, told a news conference on Tuesday: “It’s reported that they’re going to detain former president Trump.
“If that happens then everyone would know… it’s so that he doesn’t appear on the ballot,” he added.
It is alleged Trump participated in a $130,000 pay-off to former porn star Stormy Daniels, who claims to have had an affair with the former president, an allegation Trump himself denies. However, as legal scholars have pointed out, paying hush money is not a crime, and the case broadly rests on the testimony of Trump’s disgraced former lawyer, Michael Cohen.
Trump, who is currently residing in his Mar-a-Lago beach resort in Florida, has revealed he will surrender himself voluntarily should charges be brought. In an ironic twist of events, should he not surrender, the New York District Attorney’s office would need to file an extradition request from the state of Florida, a request that would ultimately be dealt with by Florida’s state governor, and Trump’s strongest rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Ron DeSantis.
“I say this because I too have suffered from the fabrication of a crime, when they didn’t want me to run,” López Obrador added, referring to allegations of election fraud he made after presidential election defeats in 2006 and 2012.
“This is completely anti-democratic…” the Mexican president said of the Trump investigation. “Why not allow the people to decide?” he added, referring to next year’s presidential election.
Obrador also said that the U.S. cannot talk about “democracy” if it is removing the opposition’s candidate from the race.
Obrador also added that the U.S. should avoid talking about human rights with Julian Assange in prison and avoid talking about violence after President Joe Biden blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, with the Mexican president citing Seymour Hersh’s report, which claims the U.S. was behind the act.
Conservative broadcaster Tucker Carlson wrote for Fox News on Tuesday: “So, in Manhattan tomorrow, what will certainly be an overwhelmingly liberal grand jury will meet, and unless something unexpected happens, Democrats will have taken the unprecedented step of using a corrupt justice system to take out the frontrunner in the Republican presidential field in a presidential race and if that happens, America will never be the same.”
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Despite his legal perils, Trump’s popularity in the race to secure the Republican nomination to contest next year’s election has only grown. In the latest poll published on Tuesday, Trump is well ahead in the eyes of U.S. conservatives with 54 percent of the vote, compared with DeSantis’ 26 percent.
And sources close to the former president have suggested he is all for being handcuffed should he make a court appearance in New York, claiming he may as well turn everything into a “spectacle,” as reported by The Guardian. He believes the footage of him being led to the courthouse in handcuffs would make him “a martyr” in the eyes of the U.S. electorate.
The Manhattan grand jury is set to convene on Wednesday afternoon at 2 p.m. to hear from at least one more witness, whose identity is unknown.
Following the hearing, the jury will vote on whether or not to indict the former president in relation to the hush-money allegation.
